Week in tech: USB 3.0, gay slurs, and Chrome syncing in the cloud

We recap the most important stories from the world of tech policy, hardware, …

USB 3.0, hidden tags on political sites, and Google cloud synchronization were the three biggest hardware and tech news stories past week, but that's not all we dug into on Ars.

Devices based on USB 3.0 will begin to arrive in 2010, but with the deadline approaching news about the spec is coming fast and furious. Ars reviews the latest developments, and looks a little bit ahead at what the near-term future holds.

US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is running for governor of Texas, but her new campaign website has already managed to get itself blocked from Yahoo and Google. Stuffing a site with 2,000+ hidden search terms, including "rick perry gay," is a good way to get the wrong kind of attention.

Google has revealed plans to build a sync service for its Chrome Web browser that will initially support bookmark synchronization, with plans to add other browser data in the future. The code will arrive this week and a test build could be made available later this month.

KDE 4.3 was released this past week with a number of intriguing improvements. Ars tests the new version, which introduces KDE's Social Desktop initiative, an effort to bring social networking integration to the popular desktop environment.

The NYSE is building a massive datacenter in New Jersey that should significantly boost the percentage of stock market activity that's nothing but computers trading against one another for millisecond profits. Critics are worried that more such trading could destabilize the markets, or worse.